Bangkok Part II

Monday morning P-Kik met me in Bangkok. We started our day off with a visit to Wat Phra Kaew and the Grand Palace. Wat Phra Kaew is home of the famous Emerald Buddha (which is actually made of jade!). The Emerald Buddha has a different royal robe for each season (hot, cool, & rainy), which the King himself changes. The Grand Palace is a former royal residence. Today the Grand Palace is only used for certain ceremonies.

Palace guard that eats humans:

Next up, we walked over to Wat Pho. This wat has the largest reclining Buddha image in the world (46m long & 15m high). In the temple you walk a circle around the big Buddha. When we first entered the temple, I asked P-Kik what all the jingling noise was because the place was nearly empty. On the way out of the temple there are eighty metal bowls where you can donate 0.25 Baht into each bowl, filling the wat with this wonderful sound.

After the rain died down, we left Wat Pho and hopped on the river bus to Wat Arun. Wat Arun is named after the Indian god of dawn (Aruna). We didn't get to stay for too long due to the all the rain, but it was great to see one of Bangkok's landmarks.

Monday night I was lucky enough to see the award winning Traditional Thai Puppet Show with traditional Thai singing and a traditional Thai orchestra(http://www.thaipuppet.com/core/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/lang,en/). This is the only place in Thailand to see this dying art. The Traditional Thai Puppet Theater Company is also the official authoritative guardian of Thai puppetry. The show we saw depicted the story of Ganesha's birth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganesha). I loved it! I recommend to everyone visiting Bangkok to see a puppet show.

After the puppet show, I had to book it to make the 10pm overnight train back to Phitsanulok. I had rented a bed on the train in one of the non-air conditioned cars (it wasn't very hot that day). I was expecting the sleeper train to be similar to what Kelly and I travelled in Egypt with private rooms...However, it was no where near as nice! I slept ok despite the fact that they never turned off the lights in the train...